Articles

For many years there were two NBA video games that battled for supremacy each fall: the NBA 2K series from 2K Sports, and the NBA Live series from EA Sports. Each franchise had fans, but there was no clear winner — no Madden, as it were. This proved healthy: both publishers were driven to innovate in an attempt to capture whatever unclaimed market share existed.

Tim Lincecum's father was a former minor league pitcher and Boeing engineer, who had developed his son’s unorthodox throwing motion according to aerodynamic principles. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was completely false. But it was still a good story.

The status of players-as-proletariat has been one of the key ironies of the lockout, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed: one of the most echoed complaints about the whole affair has been that “billionaires are telling millionaires they make too much money.”

The game that decided baseball’s 2011 season had it all: a see-saw slugfest that inevitably led to a 9th-inning blown save; a starting ace coming out of the bullpen for extra-inning heroics; a crucial defensive error setting up the series-winning run. And that’s how the Far Mountain Redhawks became the first team to come back from a 3-1 series deficit to win the championship, celebrating in front of nearly 12,000 stunned Ozarka Naturals fans at Ellie Ewing Stadium.

In the public consciousness, Frazier was always straining at the right words—any words. Not because he was an especially quiet or ineloquent man, but because he wasn’t Ali, for whom speech was performance.

Big-time college football is home to enough small grossnesses that fans barely notice them anymore. Actually, small may not be the right word for these thousands of legalistic elisions and micro-oversights and case-specific ethical lapses.

On Sunday night, a highlight video of Cuban defector and aspiring MLB center fielder Yoenis Cespedes, known as “Yoennis” up until a few days ago, appeared on YouTube. It set the sports world (well, one very specific quadrant of it) abuzz, and then just as abruptly, was removed by the uploader, presumably due to copyright issues.

This week in soccer, the clubs give way to the national teams. For some followers of the game — the special, enlightened, deeply attractive ones — it is a time of intrigue, with World Cup qualifiers taking place across the globe, and the final slots in the European Championships being filled. For others, it is anything but; to them, this is the first day of the Interlull.

Bill Lee is late. There are sixteen kids, their parents, and a man named Miro who is running for mayor waiting for him on a Little League baseball field in Burlington, Vermont. The weather is unusually cold for October, and now it’s starting to rain.